“You Are Not the Body”: (Re)Interpreting the Body in and through Integral Yoga

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and enactive immersion, the author argues that becoming an Integral Yoga practitioner involves a cognitive and perceptual reframing of the body, marked by cultivating a sense of separation or 'bodily detachment.' The chapter identifies key areas where this detachment is cultivated, attending to both somatic/practical and symbolic/discursive realms and tracing their dynamic interplay. It highlights the importance of examining talk and discourse in situ to understand how religious practices and discourses become personally meaningful.

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Abstract

Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and enactive immersion, the author argues in this chapter that “becoming” an Integral Yoga practitioner is intimately bound up with a cognitive and perceptual reframing of the body—one marked by the cultivation of a sense of separation or “bodily detachment.” In the findings, the author highlights several key areas in which bodily detachment is cultivated. In doing so, this chapter attends closely to both the somatic/practical and the symbolic/discursive realms, tracing the dynamic interplay between them. It highlights the importance, in particular, of looking at talk and discourse in situ in order to better understand how religious practices and discourses become personally meaningful.